[jimbob]

Ok, sorry Timstone, I didn't want to give advice when I'm really not that useful for the construction of the files, etc. Nevertheless, your call for suggestions elicits this:

I think it would be nice if the special racial tech weapons wouldn't require several levels of the racial tech. As it stands now, a researcher would need to do say 4 levels of racial tech to get a race specific weapon... but they would get nothing at levels 1, 2 or 3. For a new player they're going to be confused and not persue it. Instead, I propose that the race specific weaponry would work like this:

Super-duper Raiders Laser
Requirement 1: laser weapons 8
Requirement 2: (general*) medium weapons 2
Requirement 3: raiders racial tech 1 **

versus the current system:

Super-duper Raiders Laser
Requirement 1: advanced laser weapons 1 ***
Requirement 2: raiders medium weapons 2 ****

* of course there would no longer be a "general" Category, and there would be no "racial" categories here. These are really confusing, and often do not provide any immediate component pay-off. Unless one wishes to delve into the text files, they take their life into their own hands gambling on an uncertain tech tree. What if we just up the price and reduce the number of empty technologies? As far as the general and racial specific categories go, just colapse this down to a general Category, and use the racial trait instead.
** this technology will of course never need to be "researched" by the player so is a "hidden". The result? The player has one less thing to worry about.
*** which requires lasers 7 (the addition of "advanced" lasers instead of lasers 8 is confusing to me anyway. The ambiance is nice, but the confusion is overwhelming = not worth the ambiance IMHO)
**** which requires raiders light weapons 2 + raiders medium weapons 1... neither of which results in any useable components.

This way it is still necessary for the racial tech to be present, but the system is a little less convoluted. Even if things become capturable by this method, it has the advantage of elegance/simplicity = good in my book!